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by Gatsky
5204 days ago
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This is important advice. There are doctors who train for many years to counsel people and guide them through the decision making process about genetic testing for diseases. However the blog post obfuscates the fact that the kind of genome sequencing available to the public online is pretty harmless, for two reasons: A. There is no way to predict accurately individual risk of disease based on genetic information EXCEPT for a few rare diseases associated with highly penetrant mutations such as Huntington's disase, BRCA mutations (breast and ovarian cancer syndrome). Even then, taking 23andme as an example, they do not sequence enough of the BRCA gene to provide meaningful results. B. Detailed risk profiles do not appear important to health insurance companies. You can work this out by the questions they ask you - they are mainly interested in pre-existing conditions. Using blood pressure, cholesterol and family history it is possible to generate a pretty good estimation of the risk of heart disease, but AFAIK an insurance company doesn't care about this. It is also unlikely that in the future genomic information as it exists today will ever be able to predict risk accurately. So don't worry. Or even better, don't waste your money and don't worry. |
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